Throughout jazz history there have been nightclubs where the music and the atmosphere live on to become legendary, like Minton's in Harlem or Lincoln Gardens in Chicago. In Paris in the late 1940's , it was Aerobleu -- notorious for its all-night jam sessions and its enigmatic owner, Max Morgan. In the heady chaos and excitement of postwar Paris, in a time that was every bit as shadowy, as sensual, as idealistic as it was reported to be, all paths crossed at Aerobleu. Drawn by a feverish mix of music and martinis, Janet Flanner, Hemingway, Picasso, and Bogart all flocked to hear the best jazz this side of Harlem. And when Max Morgon won an old DC-3 in an all-night poker game, Miles Davis and Max Roach were there, giving flight to the music in legendary jam sessions en route to New York, Paris, London, and New Orleans. In the late 1950s, the ever-elusive Max Morgan disappeared, vanishing mysteriously from Havana, leaving behind some of the best jazz ever played and a state of mind that has come to be known as "Aerobleu."

Now a major Amazon film directed by George Clooney and starring Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Lily Rabe, and Christopher Lloyd, a raucous, poignant, luminously written memoir about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar, in the tradition of This Boy’s Life and The Liar’s Club—with a new Afterword. J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice. At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. The alphas along the bar—including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler—took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fathering-by-committee. Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak—and eventually from reality. In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys. Named a best book of the year by The New York Times, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, NPR's "Fresh Air," and New York Magazine A New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Booksense, and Library Journal Bestseller Booksense Pick Borders New Voices Finalist Winner of the Books for a Better Life First Book Award